Google Art Project Brings Street View into Galleries

Google Feb. 1 said it has begun taking its Street View
Google Maps feature into art galleries to bring images of art works to
consumers' computers via the Web.
One of the search engine's famed 20 percent projects, Google's
Art Project aims to bring more than 1,000 works of art to people who might
not otherwise get to visit major art galleries all over the world.

Google Art Project head Amit Sood
said in a blog post a small group of Googlers passionate about art put their
heads together and used Google's Street View, Picasa and App Engine technology to
take pictures of art works and assemble them on this special
Website.

The result is the 1,000 images of art that reside in 17 notable
art museums. These images include works residing in The Metropolitan Museum of
Art and MoMA in New York, Palace of Versailles in France, Tate Britain &
The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery
in Florence and Museum Campa in Prague.
The participating museums picked one artwork to be
photographed in "extraordinary detail using super high resolution or 'gigapixel'
photo-capturing technology," explained Sood.
Each of these images comprises 7 billion pixels, or
roughly 1,000 times more detailed than pictures taken by the average digital camera.
See, for example, the Latin couplet in Hans Holbein the Younger's The Merchant Georg Gisze in Berlin's Gemaldegalerie.
A microscope view leverages Picasa to render the images
at high resolution. Specifically, users viewing an image via the Art Project
Website can use a slider scroll tool to zoom in and out of a picture.
Once
a user clicks to explore an image, they're treated to a panel with information
about the artwork, artist, related works, as well as YouTube videos about the
work.
Users can also save specific views of any of the artworks
to build a personalized art collection.
How did Google capture such detailed images from inside
the museums? By using Street View, of course. The Street View team built a trolley
to take 360-degree images of art in 385 rooms within the galleries.
These stills were then "stitched together" and
mapped to their location. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from
within Street View in Google Maps.
The Art Project is an example of how valuable Street View
has become as a tool for the company as it seeks to map real-world images online.
Street View has come under siege by privacy experts after
Street View cars collected information from citizens' WiFi networks for three
years. Google is trying to assuage government concerns about this accidental data collection.